[supercat]

Absolutely no theory in science can be proven. Gravitational theory cannot be proven. Atomic theory cannot be proven. Germ theory cannot be proven. Objecting to evolution as science because it cannot be proven only demonstrates that you are fundamentally ignorant of how science works.

Gravitational theory is a theory about how things work today can be experimentally tested. Likewise atomic theory and germ theory. These theories are useful for (1) predicting what can happen, and (2) predicting what one may be able to do to cause desired things to happen. If evolutionary theory were purely applied to present and forward-going studies, there would be no objection to it.

The problem is that evolutionary theory is being applied to the past, when there are severe limits as to how well any scientific theory can be applied in that direction. To be sure, sometimes things are pretty obvious (e.g. if the floor of a buildng contains some materials, and the ceiling seems to have holes in the approximate shape of those materials, one could usually conclude that gravity caused the materials to fall from the ceiling onto the floor). In many cases, though, trying to ascertain the past by examining the present is fraught with uncertainty. For example, one might try to guess how the earth came to have its moon where it is (meteor strike, meteor capture, or whatever) but there's no way of absolutely proving any particular theory to be correct.

Can you offer any non-trivial examples where "retrograde science" (trying to predict the past) is considered infallible?

[Petrosius]

You hit the nail on the head. The debate about Evolution often centers around whether is should be called a proven fact, a theory or an hypothesis. In reality it is none of these. Evolution tries to explain how the various life forms arose. By the very nature of the subject, these events are unrepeatable and closed to observation. There is no experiment that can produce a vertebrate from an invertebrate. Even if it were theoretically possible, the millions of years that Evolution postulates would make it unobservable. Thus, not being subject to experimentation and so not being disprovable, Evolution is logically no more than conjecture. This conjecture might have sound scientific reasons behind it but it still does not rise above conjecture. Contrary to the desires of its proponents, Evolution (the explanation of why there arose new life forms in the past) is not an empirical science.

[Dimensio]

Gravitational theory is a theory about how things work today can be experimentally tested.

It's also been used to describe how stars form and how this very solar system came to exist.

Arguing that historical sciences aren't really science doesn't make you look very well-educated in science.

[johnnyb_61820]

Actually, there is a difference between the _theory_ of gravity and the _law_ of gravity. A theory is a conceptual model, while a law is a mathematical model. The idea that a "theory" is somehow higher in scientific circles than it is in the general public is incorrect, and a literature search shows that scientists do not restrain themselves to using it strictly for things that are essentially proven.

Theories are more _useful_ for scientists because they are basically hypothesis generators. Using a particular model of thought, you can generate a testable hypothesis. However, this says nothing about the validity of the theory, or that "theory" in science imputes more validity on a subject than it would in society at large.

[Virginia-American]

...Can you offer any non-trivial examples where "retrograde science" (trying to predict the past) is considered infallible?

Nothnig is considered infallible. But..

Linguistics fits your question. To explain certain regularities in the various IndoEuropean languages, Saussure hypothesized that proto-IndoEuropean had consonant sounds that had disappeared as such in all attested languages, but that had modified other sounds before disappearing. It turned out (years after Saussure's death) that Hittite had consonants where he had predicted they would be in proto-IndoEuropean. That's very simplified. Start here for more details.

It's reminiscent of the way biologists predicted the existence of a transitional series of fossils connecting reptiles and mammals, where one of the changes is the gradual change of jaw bones to ear bones. This was based, partly, on embryology (showing that Haeckel's recapitulationist theory was based on evidence, even if he generalized it too far). Later, such fossils were found. Check this out: The Gulf Coast Section of the Society of Economic Paleontologists and Mineralogists. The guys who find oil for a living.